SOURCE: “Escape from the Image: Deleuze's Image-Ontology,” in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 109-39.

In the following essay, Schwab proposes modifications to Deleuze's image-ontology theory and applies it to the genre of cinema.

In his two cinema books, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze offers an aesthetic and historical account of the cinema based on an unfamiliar and intriguing ontology—an ontology of images. Objects, qualities, processes, actions, even the brain: all are images in a dynamic universe of images. In this “image-world,” art—specifically, the cinema—emerges as something not ontologically distinct from the rest of the world. Indeed, Deleuze's theory amounts to the simultaneous dynamization and de-Platonization of the cinema. Deleuzian “image-art” is neither semblance (Schein), nor the coming to the fore of a separate and “artificial” world, nor the...